Dominus

by Steven Saylor

  Alexander smiled and looked pleased with himself. Mamaea also looked pleased. She was the last in the line of the Emesene women, thought Aulus, and of them all, the most powerful. What a long and fretful road Rome has traversed, from the rule of the Divine Marcus to the triumph of Mamaea.

  III

  MILLENNIUM

  (A.D. 248–260)

  A.D. 248

  On the first day of the year, Titus Pinarius, thirty-eight years old, was living in one of the grandest, oldest, and most famous houses in Rome: the so-called House of the Beaks once owned by Pompey the Great, Marc Antony, and various later luminaries.

  Some said the name of the house derived from Pompey’s decoration of the large vestibule with the bronze “beaks” of pirate ships he had captured in battle—fearsome objects, often fanciful in shape, intended for the deadly purpose of ramming and crippling other ships. If so, three hundred years after Pompey, no sign of any such beaks remained in the vestibule.

  With Titus that New Year’s Day was Philostratus, who was still healthy and robust despite having reached his seventies. He had been away from Rome, in retirement at Athens, but had come back to assist Titus with a very special commission from the new emperor.

  “A thousand-year history of Rome—what a splendid idea!” said Philostratus. “Long after the grand games and processions of the millennial celebration are forgotten, such a book may yet live on—perhaps for the next thousand years.”

  “You do understand that the finished work will not be entirely, or even mostly, mine,” said Titus. “I’ll be researching and writing only the concluding section, which begins in my own lifetime, with the reign of Severus Alexander. The emperor originally commissioned a scholar named Gaius Asinius Quadratus, who wrote the great bulk of it, in Greek, before he died. Perhaps the strain of writing about the False Antoninus finished him off.”

  “At least you’ll be spared from having to write that chapter,” said Philostratus.

  “The task before me is to complete the work, writing in the same brisk style as Quadratus, recounting the last twenty-five years as succinctly as possible. I’ll also review and edit Quadratus’s work—the first nine hundred seventy-five years—and produce a Latin translation, so that simultaneous editions can appear in the Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking parts of the empire. I’ve been working steadily for months, but now the deadline looms: The Millennium must be finished well before April, when the Millennial Games will take place. I have an excellent library and a competent staff of scribes and secretaries to help me, but even so, the task was beginning to seem impossible—until now. With your help, Philostratus, and the assistance of the scribes who arrived in your entourage, I think I may just be able to meet the deadline—and avoid the emperor’s wrath.”

  “And is the emperor particularly wrathful? I haven’t met him, and there’s not been much gossip about him in Athens.”

  “Frankly, I don’t know what to make of him. Despite his Greek name he really is the son of an Arab chieftain—but his father was not a brigand, as some say. His family are Arabs—he speaks Latin with a heavy accent—but also Roman citizens. He was born and raised not too far from Damascus, in a tiny village with an unpronounceable name—it sounds rather like the cough of a man with a chest cold.”

  “Chahba?”

  “Easy for you to say! He’s renamed it, after himself, of course—Philippopolis—and lavished the place with a theater and baths and even a triumphal arch, all honoring himself. One imagines that such a place in the midst of a desert must appear rather dreamlike—or perhaps nightmarish, being built of the local black basalt.”

  “He sounds quite typically Roman, in his own way,” said Philostratus with a wry smile.

  “Monomaniacal, you mean. Yes. Also monotheistic, which is decidedly not Roman.”

  “Monotheistic?” Philostratus made a face. “What an ugly word. Did you coin it? Whatever can it mean? That a man can see only one god? How sad for him. Or that he worships one god only, and ignores all the others? That would be foolhardy. Or does it mean that a person believes, literally, that there is and ever was only one god?”

  “Perhaps it’s a trait passed in the blood,” said Titus. “All this ‘one god’ business seems to originate from people at the eastern end of the empire—the False Antoninus from Emesa with his Elagabalus, the Jews with their Yahweh, the Christians with their Jesus. Did you know that Philip consorts with Christians? I’ve seen them in the palace.”

  “But Philip must honor all the gods, surely. He’s Pontifex Maximus. The whole state religion depends on him.”

  “Of course. We have the example of the False Antoninus to demonstrate what happens if an emperor rejects that duty.” Titus shuddered, reliving for an instant the horrific scene he had witnessed in the Circus Maximus when he was a boy. In his nightmares he sometimes still heard the chant: Cut off its head! Cut off its head! Make sure it’s dead! “Yes, I’m glad that particular chapter of the history was already written.”

  “Mamaea gave an ear to Christians, too,” said Philostratus. “When she went east with Alexander to make war on the Persians, she agreed to meet with a Christian named Origen, in Antioch. She wrote me a long letter about it. She was not impressed. ‘Their pallid Jesus will never supplant our beloved Apollonius of Tyana,’ she said.”

  “Apollonius’s biography is certainly better written,” said Titus, and Philostratus smiled at the compliment. “I mean that seriously. Have you ever tried to read any of the so-called biographies of Jesus? Wretchedly written. But then, few authors could hope to match your Greek. And The Life of Apollonius is your masterpiece.”

  “And I’m sure The Millennium will be yours.”

  “Don’t be absurd! Quadratus’s Greek will appall you, but you must resist the urge to rewrite the whole thing. We simply haven’t time. We must forge ahead.”

  “We certainly have the tools to do the research,” said Philostratus, as they strolled into the first of many rooms in the House of the Beaks devoted to a vast and sumptuously appointed library.

  “Yes, the library is the reason Philip is allowing me to live here, so that I have easy access to all these books. Before the Roman state took possession of the house, the last private owners were the Gordians, of course. The old man was one of the richest citizens in the empire, and his son amassed an astonishing library—over sixty thousand volumes, or so the head librarian tells me. He and his staff come attached to the library. I could never hope to locate anything without them. It is said to be the most comprehensive collection anywhere of books on the history of Rome. Everything from Herodotus to Herodian, and all the memoirs, from Sulla to Septimius Severus.”

  “No one since Severus has reigned long enough to write a memoir,” said Philostratus thoughtfully. “Severus Alexander ruled for several years, as did the third Gordian. But they both died so very young…”

  “Yes, well, I shall have to deal with all that—the ugly end of Alexander and his mother, and then the giant barbarian, Maximinus Thrax, and then the first two Gordians, father and son, and then poor Pupienus and Balbinus, gone in the blink of an eye, and then the third Gordian, the boy-emperor, who reigned for six years … which brings us up to Philip—and the Millennium of Rome.”

  “I suppose,” says Philostratus carefully, “dealing as you are with events within living memory, you will necessarily need to adopt a certain … point of view.”

  “I’ll need to tailor the narrative to suit the emperor, you mean.”

  “Put bluntly.”

  “Yes, some events are problematical. But I have no intention of writing falsehoods. When a controversy or embarrassment arises, I simply write around it. What did Berossus say? ‘When in doubt, leave it out.’”

  “He was talking about florid or obscure words, I believe, not inconvenient facts.”

  “Even so, I hope The Millennium will be, if not a masterpiece, at least something I can be proud of—that you can be proud of, as well. At any rate, I have this marvelous h
ouse to live in and a marvelous friend to help me. And this marvelous library at my disposal, at least until the book is finished. If Philip likes the book, perhaps I can stay here.”

  “You might become his court historian, and Philip your imperial patron—as Domna was my patron?”

  “Why not?”

  Provided that Philip lasts for much longer, thought Philostratus. No emperor since Severus Alexander had reigned for long—young Gordian was the longest, at six years. The empire was like an unsteady ship, pitching and shuddering in a storm. Along with the incessant threats from barbarians along the borders, within the empire insurrections and civil wars had become commonplace. There were plenty of ambitious generals and provincial governors ready and eager to dethrone Philip and to take his place. The only positive thing about the situation was that in such a turbulent world people of all stations increasingly turned to the wisdom and comfort of Apollonius of Tyana.

  “This is a beautiful house, and a magnificent library,” said Philostratus. “What a tragedy that your family compound on the Esquiline was destroyed in the great fire.”

  “Yes. Can you believe it was ten years ago? All our property in Rome, burned to ashes. The house, the workshop—with quite a few of the artists and craftsmen trapped inside. As well as…” My father, he meant to say, but his breath ran short and his voice trailed off. The memory was too painful. “Life hasn’t been easy since then. Of course, the fire will have to be in the book, and the chaos that came before it and caused it—the fighting in the streets, the looting, the arson. Terrible days. You were lucky not to be here.”

  “I’ve seen many reminders of the fire, since I arrived—buildings still in ruins, empty plots overgrown with weeds. But there also seems to be a great deal of recent construction.”

  “Rebuilding houses and baths and aqueducts kept the young Gordian busy. That’s why he built nothing in the way of monuments. And Philip has done what he can to scrub the temples and patch the potholes and repaint the statues, to have the city looking its best for its one thousandth birthday. His grandest project was to restore Augustus’s giant boating lake on the far side of the Tiber, so big it has an island in the middle. The Millennial celebrations will include gladiators staging famous naval combats—Pompey against the pirates, Augustus against Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, and so on.”

  “I suppose some of the participants will actually die in those mock battles,” said Philostratus.

  “Of course. You’re not in Athens now, my friend. This is Rome.”

  * * *

  That night, as he did often, Titus dreamed about the fire. There was no narrative to the dream and no specific location. All was confusion, suffocating smoke, searing flames.

  He woke in a cold sweat. He walked through the dark house to a balcony that looked toward the Flavian Amphitheater and the Colossus with its radiant crown. The city looked strangely unreal beneath the full moon, drained of color and eerily quiet on this chilly winter night, the silence broken only by the barking of a dog that echoed from somewhere in the Subura.

  Titus thought of the task before him, to tell the story of a time and place he knew from personal experience, though there must be no hint of himself in the story, or of his father, by far the most important person in his own life. History was an odd thing, he thought, because of all the things it leaves out. It was like a stage play with only a handful of actors, when the tale to be told involved teeming multitudes.

  The fire would certainly figure in his history, and the devastation it caused—but the huge scar it left across his own existence, the death of his father, would not be mentioned.

  He went back in his mind to the point where his story must begin, the reign of the young Severus Alexander and his mother, Mamaea. (How to include her role in the story would be a special challenge, since women hardly ever appeared in history.) Under their rule, things went quite smoothly for several years, and then came the challenge from the East—an aggressive new dynasty of Persians in charge of the Parthian Empire, now more properly called the Persian Empire. Young Alexander in his vanity thought he had become a reasonable facsimile of the Divine Marcus—was not the steadiness of the state ample evidence?—and with the Persian menace he had the chance to imitate his two namesakes, Alexander the Great and Septimius Severus. As Severus had taken Domna on campaign, calling her Mother of the Camp, so Alexander took his mother. Some made jokes about the emperor who still suckled his mama’s teats, but success on the battlefield would silence any snickering.

  But the outcome was mixed—a three-pronged attack into the enemy’s empire saw one Roman army annihilated, a second returning in tatters, and the third (with the emperor himself in charge) failing to strike when the opportunity arose. Still, a peace accord was reached, and Alexander hastened back to Rome to stage a triumph.

  Then trouble arose from the Divine Marcus’s old nemesis, the Germans. Soldiers who had fought the Persians returned to find their own homes along the northern border burned and looted and their women raped. Alexander and his mother hurried north, but when Alexander chose to give payments to the Germans instead of fighting them, resentment in the ranks boiled over, and the troops declared a new emperor.

  Maximinus Thrax could not have been more the opposite of Alexander. He was huge—some say abnormally large, as if his body simply never stopped growing—ugly to look at, easy to anger, and of very low birth. Some even called him a barbarian, but he was a merely a Thracian provincial with uncouth manners and little education outside the army, where as a soldier he excelled.

  Hundreds of miles from Rome, at the northernmost outpost of the empire in a town called Mogontiacum (named for a barbarian god), the rebellious troops came for Alexander. The twenty-eight-year-old emperor and his mother and the few officers and guards who remained loyal to them were pursued into their tent and slaughtered. Severus Alexander had reigned for thirteen years.

  Once again it was soldiers, not senators, who chose Rome’s ruler. Presented with a fait accompli, the Senate had no choice but to declare him emperor.

  Maximinus Thrax aggressively pursued war with the Germans and did not even bother to visit Rome. The little support he had in the Senate vanished when he began giving orders to kill senators (he called them traitors) and seize their property.

  A plot against Thrax was inevitable. A secret faction developed in support of the two Gordians, father and son, both men of impeccable senatorial pedigree and service to the state, immensely rich, highly educated, and popular with the Roman citizenry, thanks to the many gladiator shows and other festivals they had staged in the city. Both Gordians were away from Rome, across the sea in Carthage (where they were equally popular), ruling the province of Africa, with the eighty-year-old Gordian acting as governor and his son as his legate. In Rome, the Gordians owned the House of the Beaks, the very house in which Titus was now living. It was their library that surrounded him every day.

  In Rome, the Senate negated the imperium of Maximinus Thrax and declared Gordian and his son co-emperors, with equal powers, and eagerly awaited their arrival with troops from Africa to protect the city against the inevitable assault from Maximinus Thrax.

  Unexpectedly, the troops in Africa turned out to be loyal to Maximinus Thrax instead of the Gordians. The people of Carthage rallied in support of the Gordians and took up whatever arms they could improvise, but they were no match for the soldiers. The Gordians were besieged in Carthage. The son died fighting. The father committed suicide. They had reigned as emperors for only twenty-two days.

  In Rome, panic ensued. The Gordians were dead even before they could arrive, and Maximinus Thrax, the dreaded barbarian-emperor, was marching toward Rome. A bloodbath loomed.

  Since they had already cast the die, on the Ides of March (an unlucky day, some said) the senators voted to issue a declaration of war against Maximinus Thrax. They chose two men from their own ranks to reign, like the Gordians, as joint emperors. So equal would be their powers that both would serve as Pontifex
Maximus, a sharing of sacred status that had never occurred before. Like the Gordians, the men chosen were of impeccable pedigree, one of greater military experience and the other with greater experience at civil administration. Their names were Balbinus and Pupienus.

  Titus remembered the excitement his father had shown when the selection of Pupienus was announced. The man was a distant cousin, and had been raised just outside Rome by some of Titus’s kinsmen, the Pinarii clan of Tibur, one of whom became Pupienus’s first appointment, as city prefect. “This is a great day for the Pinarii,” Aulus told his son. “We will always have a friend in the palace as long as cousin Pupienus is emperor, especially with a Pinarius running the city.”

  Pupienus and Balbinus, provided they could fend off Thrax and remain allies, promised a return to what many thought of as a golden age, the reign of the Divine Marcus. Both emperors were great admirers and emulators of Marcus and his predecessor, Antoninus Pius, without question the wisest and gentlest men ever to rule Rome. And, like Pius, they were already reaching old age (Balbinus in his sixties, Pupienus in his seventies) and might be expected, when the time came, to pass the throne to men of merit rather than blood kin. Even the Divine Marcus had erred when he arranged for his son to succeed him.

  Pupienus was sent north with an army to stop Thrax before he could enter Italy. The city held its breath, awaiting news of the outcome, torn between hope and dread.

  Then a new problem arose.

  Partly spurred by a senatorial faction that had favored the Gordians, partly by the perverse sentimentality of the populace, and partly by the Praetorian Guards (jealous that the Senate had taken back the prerogative of choosing emperors), a mass movement sprang up asserting that only someone of Gordian blood could legitimately succeed the dead emperors in Africa. The elderly Gordian’s grandson lived in Rome and was put forward. Though the boy’s name was not Gordian, his supporters called him that. He was only thirteen—Rome’s youngest emperor yet.